Vargas Adds a Pitch

Jason Vargas of the Seattle Mariners pitched the first shutout of this career Friday night.*  His two prior outings, however were less than successful as he allowed eleven runs in 7 2/3 innings.

*Vargas pitched nine shutout innings on May 12th of this year, but the game went into extra innings and he was not credited with a shutout.

In his starts of May 23-29, Vargas failed to spin his cutter very differently than his four-seam fastball:

Jason Vargas, spin on fast pitches, May 23 & 29 2001.The fastball is in green and the cutter in yellow.  The spin is so close, some of the cutters were classified as fastballs by the PITCHf/x algorithm.  With little difference in movement and less velocity, batters went 3 for 7 against the cutter and 12 for 35 against the fastball.

Looking at the same spin chart from June 3rd, Vargas made two changes:

Jason Vargas, spin on fast pitches, June 3, 2011.First, notice that the cutter shows complete separation from the fastball.  The spin between the two pitches is very different.  Batters went 0 for 2 on the cutter.  More importantly, notice the fastball now exhibits two centers of mass, lighter, faster pitch with more vertical break and a darker, slower pitch with more horizontal break.  That latter pitch is a two-seam fastball, something he didn't throw in his two previous starts.  Batters went two for 17 against those two fastballs.  So Vargas added a pitch and improved the spin on his cutter.  He went from two fastballs that were tough to distinguish to three fastball that moved very differently, and found great success.

Pineda's Perfect Pitch

Michael Pineda (SEA) is a leading rookie of the year candidate as he owns a 6-2 record and 2.16 ERA after nine starts.  He excels at all aspects of the game as a pitcher, striking out a high number of batters while allowing few walks and home runs.  So far, he's accomplished this with two pitches, a fastball and a slider.

The spin view from the PITCHf/x data allows easy identification of the two pitches:

Michael Pineda, pitch spin by velocity, 2011.The red blob represents Pineda's fastball, while the green area indicates the slider.  The location of the fastball indicates that Michael is not perfectly over the top, but his arm slot is a bit right of center which gives his fast ball a little lateral movement, but also keeps it from dropping too much.  As we've seen with Matt Cain, the high fastball is tough to hit for a home run.

The slider, on the other hand, is almost perfectly straight.  A proper slider is thrown with the spin perpendicular to the flight of the ball, so there is no Magnus force.*  Michael gets very close to the ideal with his slider.

*Update: I want to clarify this statement.  The spin of a slider is perpendicular to the spin of a fastball.  The axis of spin of the slider is parallel to the flight of the ball, which is why batters see a dot as the pitch approaches.

The most impressive aspect of his slider, however, is his ability to repeat that spin:

Michael Pineda, pitch spin by frequency, 2011.The bullseye of the slider is quite concentrated compared to the fastball.  That indicates Michael can repeat the pitch consistently, which makes it much easier for him to spot the ball where he likes.  He hits the strike zone 55.8% of the time with the pitch, which is tied for the best in the league.  He doesn't hang the pitch either, as batter have yet to hit a home run off it, and slug just .211 against it.  For him, the slider is the perfect pitch.

Which Pitchers are Really Getting Squeezed?

Earlier in the week we took a look at which pitchers have been squeezed the most based on total pitches called balls within the PitchFX established strike zone.  While it appeared that pitchers like C.J. Wilson (TEX) and Jon Niese (NYM) have been getting a tight strike zone, the truth is that these pitchers tend to stay around the strikezone with the majority of their pitches.  In fact, C.J. Wilson leads the league in called strikes within the strike zone:

(Data from all 2011 games through May 10th)

So in reality, while pitchers like Wilson do lose a lot of called strikes on the borders, it's mostly a product of the volume of pitches they locate there.  In fact, through Tuesday, Wilson was leading all pitchers in total called strikes, regardless of location, with 194.

If we really want to see which pitchers have had a tough time getting calls from umps, we need to look at the percentage of called strikes out of all taken pitches within the strike zone.

 (Data from all 2011 games through May 10th - Min. 40 taken pitches in the strike zone)

Wilson still cracks the top 50, but he's far from the most squeezed pitcher in the league.  Mariners' closer Brandon League is not getting the majority of close calls so far this season.  The league average for called strikes in the PitchFX defined strike zone has been around 77%, meaning umpires have called 23% of pitches in the zone balls.  Of course, the majority of these are borderline pitches as the following graphic shows:

All MLB Called Balls in Strike Zone (Click to enlarge)

League's missed strikes consist of 18 pitches, the majority of which were thrown to the bottom of the zone.  Batters have taken only 42 total strike zone pitches against him, so his "squeeze rate" is mostly a product of small sample size.  However, when we filter the list down to starters....

(Data from all 2011 games through May 10th)

Among starters, Wilson and Niese still near the top of the list of pitchers getting squeezed. And perhaps Nelson Figueroa would still be pitching in Houston if we had robot umpires.

So we've seen which pitchers have not gotten the majority of close calls so far this season.  In an upcoming post, we'll look at pitchers that have benefited most from expanded strike zones.